Comment by runarberg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by runarberg | Hacker News Reader

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I keep thinking about dinosaurs in this context. How do we know how dinosaurs looked like? All we have are some scattered fossilized bones (and footprints) found in a layer of sediment, which experts have carefully (and perhaps wrongly) puzzled together.

Is it wrong to extrapolate the missing pieces to make a complete skeleton? Some experts are able to make really good academic guesses on if the dinosaur species in question had feathers or scales, the size of its lips and toungue, and sometimes even its color. Is it wrong to create a drawing or a 3D rendering of these guesses?

I suppose, to an extent, it is really important to understand how we can know these things from only a few fossilized bone fragments. But to a layperson it is certainly more interesting to see our best guess of how it looked like in reality. Just a picture or description of the original pieces of fossils in that layer of sediment certainly does not do justice to an amazing animal that once walked the earth.

I suppose you could also make the case that we can get it wrong and a false picture of dinosaurs would enter the popular discourse. But I would argue that it would probably be even worse if experts wouldn’t paint their best guess at the time, and left it to the imagination of fiction media to recreate it for the population.

Nit: We have some very good fossils of dinosaurs that have preserved skin, coloration, feathers, and even gut contents. It's not just bones anymore. PBS Eons had a good one on a recent-ish find:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-UZXBF63z4

They also have a good one on the history of dinosaur illustration:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDnQmBFxIfE

I was hoping someone would bring up PBS Eons, such a lovely series. In fact I was thinking about An Illustrated History of Dinosaurs when writing this comment.

I feel like even a child knows that a dinosaur is a reconstruction. How could it be anything else? They don't exist today.

But a high definition video is what we've naturally been used to "believing in" as being real.

Of course the next generation of people will grow up with deep fakes, so they will not trust anything they watch unless it's digitally signed or something.u

I feel that is the difference.

I remember as a kid that dinosaurs felt just as alien to me as lions. Neither existed in the country where I grew up. They had real footage of lions, but they also had what felt like real footage of dinosaurs. Off course I knew lions existed today in Africa, but dinosaurs existed in the past all over the planet (except on the island where I grew up). To me it didn’t feel like neither the lion nor the dinosaur were reconstructed.

I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. They were able to capture the fascination of a kid by making the dinosaur look as real as a lion, and that’s really cool. It turned out their recreations were wrong, e.g. the T-Rex didn’t have any lips and no feathers in these pictures, but now we think they had both. That’s OK. Growing up I learned that they don’t know everything, and there are still things left to discover.

I bet a future teenager will be astonished to find out they didn’t have high quality color film in the early 20th century, that the films they’ve seen from that period have been colored in using modern technology. Just as I was astonished to find out that they didn’t actually know how dinosaurs looked like, but were able to guess using varying techniques.

> I feel like even a child knows that a dinosaur is a reconstruction. How could it be anything else? They don't exist today.

It's possible to see recreations of extinct animals that humans have overlapped with enough to write and draw how they looked. It's even possible to see real specimens of extinct creations, such as the Oxford Dodo https://www.oumnh.ox.ac.uk/the-oxford-dodo

You don't need much more knowledge, but definitely more than "they don't exist today". But equally with colourised photos/video: you don't need more knowledge than "this was filmed before it was possible to film in colour, so all colours are guesses".

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